“Name’s Jake Yocke.”
“Shirley Ross.”
She wasn’t cover girl Cosmo gorgeous, Yocke concluded, but she had perfect bones: the forehead, the cheekbones, the chin. Her face was a feast for the eyes.
She had been here over a year, she told Yocke, first as an interpreter for an American telecommunications company, then as a journalist for an English-language monthly magazine published here.
“Small world. I scribble for a living too. Washington Post.”
“The Post?”
“The one and only.”
“Do you know Sally Quinn?” Sally was a Post reporter, columnist and all-around original character. She had even written a novel or two.
“Uh-huh.”
Shirley Ross grinned.
Twenty minutes later they were sitting in the corner sipping Bailey’s. “So how is this borsch batch going to come out?” Yocke asked her.
“You want a prediction?”
He nodded.
“Yeltsin, democracy and where to place your bets for the coming civil war.”
Yocke tasted his drink again. She was working on her second but he was still nursing his first. After the whiskey at the embassy and the coffee here the liqueur was too sweet. And he was feeling the alcohol. This woman in front of him was also stimulating his hormones.
Her discussion of the political situation struck Jack Yocke as enlightened and well informed. She got her tongue around the names of these Russian politicians without a single slip. Jack Yocke felt slightly deflated. Shirley Ross knew more about Russian politics than he ever hoped to know. When she fell silent he told her that.
She grinned again. “Not really. It’s my job. You’ll pick it up. Wow your friends back home when they get tired of talking about TV shows and movies. People will avoid you at cocktail parties.” She mugged with a suspicious glance out of the corner of her eyes, then joined him in laughter.
He looked into those deep brown eyes and felt completely at ease. American women are the very best. “This Soviet Square killing — what are people saying about that?”
Her eyes flicked around the room and came to rest on him. “Do you want Sunday op-ed bullshit or do you want the truth?”
Dimitri was loading the German-made dishwasher and making the usual noises. Jack and the woman were the only people in the bar. “Without surrendering my right to later argue that op-ed pieces are an attempt to write the truth, I choose the second alternative. What truth do you know?”
She toyed with her swizzle stick while he studied her face. At last the eyes came up to meet his. “The truth will never come out.”
“Perhaps,” he said, and relaxed. He looked at his watch. Tomorrow was going to be a long day hunting for cops willing to talk while he listened to Gregor’s tales of Brooklyn. He took a deep breath, exhaled and scooted his chair back. “Do you come here often, Shirley?”
“The KGB is setting up Yeltsin.”
“How do you know that?”
“I can’t tell you.”
Yocke squared off to face her. “What can you tell me?”
“Nothing that you can print.” She lay down the swizzle stick and hunted in her purse. She extracted a pack of Marlboros and a pack of matches. After she lit one she examined Yocke’s face through the smoke.
“You came here tonight to meet me, didn’t you?”
Her eyes stayed on his face. She smoked the cigarette in silence. The dishwasher behind the bar lit off with a rumble.
“Anything you tell me I have to confirm. Someone else must confirm every fact or I can’t print it.”
“If you ever tell anyone where you got this or who I am you will ruin me.”
“We never reveal sources who request anonymity.”
“This is Russia.”
She didn’t know anything. Perhaps she thought she knew something, but what the hell could it be? She’s an American, for Chrissake!
“Three KGB officers…” She stubbed out the cigarette and looked at Dimitri, who was working on receipts on an IBM computer terminal. Her eyes came back to Yocke.
“Three KGB officers…” He had to lean forward across the table to hear her voice above the noise of the dishwasher.
She swallowed and fumbled for another cigarette.
“Three KGB officers went to police headquarters a half hour before the assassination. They ordered the police away from Soviet Square.”
“How do you know this?”
A whisper: “The order was transmitted over the radio. The police in the square heard it on their little radios. You’ve seen those little radios they wear, haven’t you?”
“I’ve seen them.” The police here were wired up just like the cops in Washington and Detroit.
“Kolokoltsev was a pawn sacrifice. It’s the king they want.”
“Who’s they?” To his chagrin, Yocke’s voice came out a whisper. He raised it a notch and repeated the question. “Who’s they?”
She just shook her head.
“I need some names.”
She leaned back and sucked fiercely on the cigarette. Her eyes went to Dimitri and stayed there.
“He can’t hear us.”
“He’s KGB. All these hard-currency hotel people are.”
“He can’t hear us over that dishwasher,” Yocke insisted. “You’re going to have to point me in the right direction. Give me a name. One name. Any of them. Any one of them.”
She stabbed the cigarette out in the ashtray and drained her drink.
“I have to have someplace to start looking, Shirley, or your trip down here was a waste of time. You must know how goddamn tough it is to get Russians to open up to an American reporter. It’s like asking a dope dealer if he’s got a load coming in anytime soon.”
Her lips twisted into an attempt at a grin as she stood up. Now the lips straightened. Gripping her purse tightly she leaned across the table and whispered, “Nikolai Demodov.”
“Was he one of the three?”
But she was walking out. She went through the door and turned left and was gone.
Up in his room Jack Yocke wrote the name on his computer screen and sat staring at it. Nikolai Demodov.
Well, it was a pretty story. No getting around that. A pretty story. He didn’t know enough to even guess how much truth there might be to the tale, if any, but his instinct told him some truth was there. You develop that instinct in this business after you have listened to a lot of stories. Maybe it’s their eyes, the body language.
He tapped aimlessly on the keyboard for a few moments, then turned the computer off.
He brushed his teeth and washed his face and hands and stared at his reflection in the mirror over the sink while he thought about Shirley Ross and the three KGB agents.
If only he could have gotten more out of her. How should he have handled it? She must have known all three of the names. At the minimum she knew how the hell Nikolai Demodov fits in. Where had he lost her? And where did she get her information?
Aaagh! To be tantalized so and have the door slammed in your face! Infuriating…
Most people are poor liars. Oh, every now and then you meet a good one, but most people have not had the practice it takes to tell a lie properly. Cops can smell a lie. So can some lawyers and preachers. And all good reporters. Even if you can’t put your finger on why it plays right, you know truth when you find it.
Just now Jack Yocke decided he had seen some of it. And the glimpse excited him.
10
Sergi Pavlenko was dozing in the guard shack when the noise of a helicopter brought him awake. He was nineteen years old, a conscript from a collective farm, and he was not used to helicopters. He came immediately awake and went outside where he could see better.
It was one in the morning, the middle of the summer night, which was still short here three hundred miles southeast of Moscow at the Serdobsk Nuclear Power Plant.